To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell

To His Coy Mistress

by Andrew Marvell

"Had we but world enough, and time,/

This coyness, lady, were no crime."

(1-2)

Through the eyes of the speaker, the world does not provide enough time for his lady lover to be coy and not have sex with him; therefore, this a crime. Throughout the rest of this poem, this lusty lover tries to persuade his mistress into having a sexual relationship with him. This was originally a Carpe Diem poem which means "seize the day" and in this poem, that message is exactly what the speaker is trying to communicate to his mistress.

The denotation and connotation in this poem is used quite frequently in order to stress the importance of having sex before time runs out. In line 24, "Deserts of vast eternity" is referring to death. He is stating that the only that lies ahead of them is death and so they must take advantage of their prime and have sex before it is too late. In line 22, "Time's winged chariot hurrying near" is emphasizing that life's a race against time. In this line, chariot represents a race or war even, meaning time is their enemy. "The grave's a fine and private place,/ But none, I think, do there embrace" (32-33) these two lines mean a complexity of things but in simple terms, the grave here means marriage and in the speaker's eyes, this means no sex. Finally, in line 39, "...like amorous birds of prey" is referring to two lovers attacking each other. There is a handful of figurative language throughout this poem as well.

The figurative language used in this poem confirms the idea that the speaker is only interested in sex and not anything more. In line 11 "My vegetable love should grow" is overall a bad and sleazy pick up line. Vegetables take a long time to grow and then they rot. Instead of using this word, the speaker should have used fire which is passionate or a tree because it means that their love would last forever because they would establish roots. In like 31 "The grave's a fine and private place" is metaphor for death but also, it proves that the speaker views old age and death as the same thing. An examples of a simile is used in line 24, "Sits on thy skin like a morning dew." Overall, To His Coy Mistress is a poem of lust and the lines men will say in order to obtain sex with a woman.

The Man He Killed -Thomas Hardy

The Man He Killed

By Thomas Hardy

In his poetry, Thomas Hardy often protested man’s inhumanity to man. As a strong opponent to the Boer War, in which the British fought the Boers for the control of South Africa, Hardy wrote his poem, “The Man He Killed.” Hardy reveals the reality that soldiers in wars often merely carry out orders of their leaders without understanding the motives of war.
This poem focuses on the role of random fate in the lives of two young soldiers as they meet each other in battle. The speaker reflects on the fact that if he and the soldier he kills had only met earlier in a pub, they might have been friends and shared a beer. He then goes on to convince himself that because they were both in the infantry, he had to shoot him “Because he was my foe” (10). Even as he rationalizes with himself, his words prove unconvincing. He then wonders to himself why his enemy joined the army and if it was for the same reason as his own. He imagines that neither of them had any solid reason to join the war other than being out of work and needing the salary. In this poem, Hardy captures the irony of the fact that most soldiers do not join the army for lofty patriotic purposes, but rather out of the impulse of personal need. By focusing on the meaningless of this soldier’s death, Hardy reiterates the absurdity and senselessness of war.
Throughout the poem, Hardy uses literary devices of irony, repetition, and imagery. When the young soldier kills his enemy, he ironically realizes that his enemy might have been his friend and might have had no other reason the join the war than he did. Hardy uses repetition in the lines such as: “face to face”; “I shot at him” and “I shot him dead”; “you shoot a fellow down”; “he was my foe” and “my foe of course he was” to emphasize how the soldiers trying the persuade himself that what he did was right. Finally, Hardy uses the image of an “ancient inn” and a “nipperkin” and a “bar” and “half a crown” as a contrast to his images of war. These images symbolize civilized conversations between friends contrasted with confronting each other in a battle field.
With this short poignant poem, Hardy protests war by putting a human face on it.

Winter by William Shakespeare
The speaker is a family member who is likely to be the most respected out of the family. His occasion for writing this poem confirms his dislike of winter and the purpose of it allows the reader to be empathetic and feel the hardships he goes through during this season. The literary devices shown in this poem is irony:
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
"Tu-whit, tu-who!"
A merry note (6-8)
The word merry stands out because the rest of the poem is contains very negative content. Another device is the use of paradox as shown in the quote above as well. Stating what the owl hoots is a use of onomatopoeia. After reading this poem I felt disdained towards winter which I believe Shakespeare was trying the achieve.